Grant, Gino and Hofmann’s 2011 research found that less-extraverted leaders got better results from proactive teams—not because they adopted more employee ideas, but because their receptiveness made employees feel valued and work harder.

The qualities that help someone look like a leader are not always the qualities that help a particular team do its best work.

Talkativeness is visible. Assertiveness sounds like certainty. Someone who speaks readily, takes charge and occupies attention can look leader-like before the group has produced anything at all.

That helps explain why extraversion has long been associated with emerging as a leader and receiving favourable leadership ratings. Performance, however, depends on what the rest of the team brings into the room.

In 2011, Adam Grant, Francesca Gino and David Hofmann reported a useful reversal. More-extraverted leaders performed better with relatively passive teams, while less-extraverted leaders performed better when employees were proactive. The researchers argued that receptive behaviour encouraged those proactive employees to put more effort into the work.

The detail that makes the result interesting is also the detail most summaries lose: the less-extraverted leaders did not gain an advantage by accepting more suggestions. In the experiment, perceived receptivity mattered even when the suggested idea itself was not what improved performance.

The field result came from 57 pizza stores

The paper in the Academy of Management Journal began with a real workplace. The researchers sent questionnaires to 130 stores operated by franchisees of a US pizza-delivery company. Fifty-seven stores supplied complete data, a response rate of 43.1 per cent.

As the Harvard Business School account of the research explained, the final field sample contained 57 store managers and 374 employees, or an average of about 6.6 employee respondents per store. The managers rated their own Big Five personality traits, including whether they tended to be assertive, talkative, bold, reserved or introverted.

Employees rated the usual behaviour of colleagues in their store. The proactivity measure combined three related forms of behaviour: voicing ideas, taking charge to improve procedures and trying to influence a manager upwards.

The researchers then examined each store’s profits during the seven weeks after the survey. Their models accounted for average order price and worker hours, two strong influences on store profitability, along with the managers’ other Big Five traits and their interactions with employee proactivity.

The crossover appeared. In stores with relatively low employee proactivity, manager extraversion was associated with higher profits. In stores with high proactivity, greater manager extraversion was associated with lower profits.

That was a field association, not a clean causal test. Managers were not randomly assigned personalities, and stores may have differed in ways the model did not capture. The authors therefore constructed a laboratory experiment in which leadership behaviour and follower proactivity could be varied.

The laboratory became a T-shirt folding contest

According to the full author-hosted paper, the second study recruited 163 university students with an average age just under 21 and formed 56 groups. Each group included a student assigned to lead, two ordinary student followers and two research assistants who posed as additional followers.

The task was simple: fold as many T-shirts as possible in ten minutes. Members of the most productive groups could win iPod Nanos, giving participants a reason to care about the result.

Before starting, each leader read one of two short cases. One promoted bold, talkative and assertive leadership; the other promoted quiet, shy and reserved leadership. Leaders then recalled a time when they had led effectively in the assigned manner. The exercise altered how extravertedly they behaved during the task, so the experiment tested an enacted style rather than sorting people into permanent personality types.

The two confederates also followed a script. In the passive condition, they did what the leader instructed. In the proactive condition, one wondered aloud whether a more efficient method existed. The other proposed teaching the group a faster Japanese folding technique.

When the confederates were passive, teams in the more-extraverted leadership condition folded an average of 167.93 shirts. Those under less-extraverted leadership averaged 137.64.

When the confederates became proactive, the result reversed. Teams with less-extraverted leaders averaged 175.43 shirts, compared with 142.00 under more-extraverted leaders. The interaction was statistically significant.

The extra work came from followers

The team totals could have risen because quieter leaders folded more shirts themselves. They did not.

The researchers separated the output of leaders and ordinary followers, excluding the confederates whose output had been held roughly constant. Leadership style and proactivity did not significantly alter leader output. The difference came from the followers.

Under the proactive condition, followers working with less-extraverted leaders folded an average of 59.64 shirts. Followers under more-extraverted leaders averaged 46.61. The same contrast was not statistically significant when confederates remained passive.

Followers also rated leaders on whether they seemed open to new ideas, receptive to suggestions and interested in their contributions. With proactive confederates, the less-extraverted leaders received an average receptivity rating of 5.35 on the seven-point scale, compared with 4.32 for the more-extraverted leaders.

A mediation analysis was consistent with those receptivity ratings accounting for the difference in follower performance. Put plainly, proactive employees appeared to work harder when the leader’s manner suggested that their input had been taken seriously.

This sharpens a distinction from an earlier Silicon Canals article on speaking time and leadership emergence. Airtime can help a person become recognised as the leader. It does not follow that occupying more airtime will make every team perform better.

Accepting the idea did not explain the result

Perhaps less-extraverted leaders simply adopted the proposed folding method more often, allowing everyone to work faster. The researchers checked, and the data did not support that explanation.

Among proactive groups, 8 of 14 leaders in the low-extraversion condition accepted the suggestion, or 57.1 per cent. In the high-extraversion condition, 9 of 14 accepted it, or 69.2 per cent. That difference was not statistically significant and, if anything, ran numerically against the simple story.

Adoption itself also did not significantly improve output. Followers whose leader accepted the method folded an average of 161.82 shirts as a group, compared with 156.60 when the leader rejected it. The ten-minute task left little time to recover the cost of teaching and learning the new technique.

The implication is subtle. Receptivity is not identical to agreement. A leader can listen, ask questions and give an idea serious consideration before deciding that it will not work. Conversely, a leader can approve a suggestion while communicating impatience or indifference.

Employees often learn from that process whether offering the next idea will be worth the social risk. A decision can be “no” while the interaction still says, “your judgement belongs in this room.”

“Feeling valued” is an interpretation, not a direct measure

The authors proposed a motivational mechanism. When employees believe a leader values their contributions, they may feel an obligation to contribute and expect their effort to matter. When a leader appears dismissive, that motivation can fade.

This is the basis for describing receptive leaders as making employees feel valued and work harder. It is a plausible reading of the pattern, but the measurement boundary matters.

The experiment directly measured perceived leader receptivity and observable folding output. It did not separately measure whether participants felt valued, nor did it ask them to report how hard they tried. Greater follower output served as evidence of effort, while feeling valued formed part of the authors’ theoretical explanation.

The statistical mediation result strengthens the proposed pathway, but it does not turn every link in that pathway into a directly observed fact. Receptivity could also affect attention, coordination, comfort, confidence or another unmeasured process.

This is a matching argument, not a quiet-leader rule

The study is regularly retold as a general victory for introverted managers. Its actual conclusion is conditional.

When followers were passive, the more-extraverted style produced higher output. A quiet and reserved leader paired with a team waiting for direction created one of the weaker combinations. When followers supplied initiative, less-extraverted leadership allowed that initiative to contribute more fully.

The authors interpreted this through dominance complementarity. Assertive behaviour from both leader and employees can create friction over status and control. Little assertiveness from either side can leave a group without momentum. Performance may improve when initiative from one side is met by room on the other.

That does not require treating extraversion as a fixed uniform package. A naturally talkative leader can learn to pause, solicit dissent and show that suggestions have been considered. A reserved leader can become more directive when a group needs clarity and movement. The laboratory manipulation itself demonstrated that people could temporarily enact a more or less extraverted style.

It also does not mean every employee proposal deserves adoption. Proactivity can be badly informed, self-serving or aimed in the wrong direction. The study tested a constructive suggestion with at least some potential to improve the task.

The evidence has limits, including a later provenance note

Both studies centred on structured, repetitive, effort-based work: delivering pizzas and folding shirts. The authors explicitly cautioned that the pattern might not generalise in the same way to difficult, complex or creative tasks, where knowledge and ability may matter more.

The field study covered one company and relied on self-reported manager traits alongside employee ratings. Its 57-store sample was useful but modest. The experiment involved young students, a ten-minute contest and a conspicuous scripted suggestion. An established workplace with history, hierarchy and real career consequences is not the same social environment.

There is another piece of context that should not be omitted. In a 2023 data-provenance disclosure, Grant wrote that Gino ran the second study and that he had never possessed its raw data. He said the laboratory data were being audited. The Academy of Management’s current page continues to list the paper rather than a retraction. The disclosure does not establish that the reported result is wrong, but the absence of a public audit outcome warrants caution.

The field and laboratory findings therefore should not be treated as a universal law of team design. They are two studies supporting a specific interaction, with the laboratory evidence carrying an unresolved provenance qualification.

Receptivity is visible before agreement

The practical lesson is not to choose leaders by personality label. It is to look at the fit between how leadership is expressed and how initiative is distributed across the team.

A hesitant team may benefit from someone willing to set direction, speak first and create momentum. A group full of people who notice problems and volunteer solutions may need a leader who can resist converting every contribution into a contest for the floor.

That second skill becomes visible in small behaviours. The leader lets someone finish. They ask a question before defending their own view. They can explain why an idea is being rejected without implying that it was foolish to offer it. They return credit when another person’s suggestion changes the plan.

None of those behaviours obliges a leader to surrender judgement. They communicate that employee voice has been processed rather than merely tolerated.

The person who fills the silence is often the easiest one to recognise as a leader. Grant, Gino and Hofmann’s finding suggests that, for a proactive team, the more consequential ability may be knowing when to leave enough silence for other people to keep contributing.